To be fair, he didn’t start investing real over-the-average effort until after it took off. In the early indev days it was just another one of his many toys. Once it became his largest project, he gave it more love (as any of us would do). 
Attention can be a huge motivator, if any one of us had one of our projects suddenly get a thousand people interested you bet we’ll start working on it more than any other project we’ve worked on since then.
It’s “luck” in the sense that Markus did not set out to make a $2bn game. He was just having fun.
Cas
In respect to JGO… I just keep thinking… Who’s next here; this rodeo ain’t over… :o
And he engaged the community in a manner that lit like wildfire. They felt like part of the success. Kickstarter before Kickstarter.
Extensible, creative, a present to be found around every corner, emergent gameplay. Lightening in a bottle.
P.S. Hey Cas
Hi Chris, long time no see
Cas
I like to think I have just the right amount of not giving a fuck to handle the kind of “pressure” that Notch and Flappy Birds guy can’t handle. Bring it on!
Ah we all do until it actually happens.
This is one of the main reasons why MineCraft was so successful: because java applets let players try out the free version in the beginning.
Now that applets are dead, moving to javascript/webGL seems like a good idea. But I don’t think webGL support is universal yet and there are still many browser bugs.
Congrats to Notch, he’s an inspiration to us all. I don’t think he sold out, he stuck it to the man by charging $2.5b!
For the amount of money that notch got from minecraft, I too am willing to challenge the pressure of handling such games ;D
Not to mention he kinda just up and quit all serious development of, well, anything, for the past 2 years. He’s just been playing around mostly.
Isn’t that what you do when you’re rich?
It’s what I would do. :point:
It’s what I do already, and I’m anything but rich. 
He was on a trajectory to success. Doesn’t his left4k dead game just about predate Minecraft and that gained some traction in press and got a lot of plays. This probably help build his profile and gather more followers on twitter. This in turn would have helped minecraft get an initial uptick. Obviously helped by it being a fun game with potential if you are into that type of game.
So yep luck that his success was so big but he probably would have had some success at some point.
I think charging money for the alpha versions was a smart move.
When people actually pay for something, they have a bigger attachment to the product, and follow it more
during development. “Its mine”
Something that comes for free can be aquired any time, and then risks beeing forgotten.
Also, if you own a software, you are more likely to invest time into making is run (install an new JRE, fix drivers)
whereas a free game - that does not work instantly and painlessly - wont get the same effort. “Skip to the next”
@Damocles I disagree with you, capitalism isn’t implemented in every brain, some people can pay attention to a project even though they pay nothing for it and a bad paid game can be forgotten too.
Im not talking about “everyone”, but about a general machanism in how people assign values.
Beeing noticed, remembered and gaining traction by word of mouth is the biggest asset in Indy development.
And people will remember their property better than (one of many) free offers.
There’s even a name for this way of thinking. It’s called the endowment effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
Thanks for the link.
I bought MC just after it came out of Alpha.
Notch should be proud of his product, no one really has the right to complain about his move. He has brought millions of people joy (and still bringing it, in fact right now I am playing with my gf…playing minecraft that is) from what as basically a “mess around” project, with a smaller user base to exploded and went viral.
He has stuck by his community and kept in touch with them throughout the whole process, he is what we should be aspiring to be imo. He never simply fucked off as soon as is wallet started to get too heavy to lift.
Also, I agree with some other posters here. The success of his game was luck and he happened to have got the right peoples attention, but he thrived on it and took a huge risk. There was every chance it could have been a “flavour of the month” thing, he gave up is career and probably a lot of other things to work on it.
His risk paid off.
/tips hat